Tag Archives: success

Sabbatical Journey…On Reframing Puzzles

25 Sunday Jun 2023

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Las Vegas Sign (Photo Credit: Jennifer Andrews-Weckerly; reuse with permission)

Tonight, we were able to squeeze in a magic show in our short trip with family in Las Vegas.  Perhaps my favorite part of the show was a puzzle trick.  Jen Kramer, the magician, showed us a puzzle, surrounded by a frame.  She removed the frame, showing us how it was solid.  Then she pulled the magnetic puzzle pieces apart, encouraging us to imagine each piece as a part of lives that define who we are:  special transformative moments, meeting a mentor or a love interest, our family or friends, and on and on.  She reassembled the pieces, and then reminded us that sometimes other pieces are added that don’t quite fit – perhaps a challenge that we cannot quite overcome.  Then she rearranged the pieces and somehow managed to get them back into a perfect square.  The idea is that the challenges and failures of life shape who we are just as much as the blessings.  But the master trick was that when she went to put the frame back on, the puzzle still fit into the frame with the new pieces – the challenge or failure we didn’t plan absorbed into the whole of ourselves.

I loved this metaphor for life in general.  How often do we see hurdles and challenges as something to be glossed over or hidden away:  the diagnosis we struggled to overcome, the job we didn’t get, the lover we lost?  Too often, we see those things as something outside ourselves, as though because we didn’t “win” them, they exist outside of ourselves.  But those challenges and failures are just as much a part of who we are as all the good parts.  Invariably, those no’s lead to shifts in who we are – sometimes helping us find a yes we did not know to pursue.  Sometimes those losses make us appreciate our gains in life.  Sometimes those hurts help us learn to heal into something stronger.

Living in Sin City for the last 36 hours, I have been thinking a lot about poor decisions, losses of all kinds, and regretted behavior.  But much like that magnetic puzzle, I do not think repentance is something that whitewashes our lives before God.  Repentance is about acknowledging how the bad in life has impacted us and those around us as much as the blessings in life.  Though we might want to hide those seeming failures from everyone else, God walks with us through the good, the bad, and the ugly – and offers to make us whole again, managing not to erase parts of us, but to redeem us and use the not so good to shape us into even better selves. 

I wonder what part of your life seems to not “fit” into your perfectly framed life?  How might the Holy Spirit be inviting you to reimagine your “frame,” so that others might not see the posed picture of you, but the full, vulnerable, real picture of you?  Your invitation today is to love all the parts of you that can squeeze into your otherwise perfect frame.  Perhaps the parts that you want to purge might actually become the parts that help others frame their imperfect lives.

Sabbatical Journey…on Butterflies and Beauty

19 Monday Jun 2023

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Photo credit: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/central-high-school-integration

Our second day of travels landed us in Little Rock, Arkansas.  We had mostly planned to get here and head straight to the hotel, but traffic was forgiving, and gave us a little extra time.  So, we hopped over to the Little Rock Central High School National Park Site.  As a refresher, in 1957, Central High became the epicenter of confrontation and the catalyst for change in enforcing the decision of Brown v. Board to integrate schools.  Three years after the Supreme Court decision, the “Little Rock Nine,” were denied entrance to the school, and President Dwight D. Eisenhour had to federalize the Arkansas National Guard to safely enable the Little Rock Nine to successfully attend school. 

As I was looking at the photos at the National Park, I noticed a butterfly flitted past me and landed right next to a picture of those National Guardsmen protecting those students.  I was reminded of how even in the darkest times, one can find beauty.  I do not know the stories of those men who protected those students.  Maybe they did it because they were obligated to help by order of the President.  Maybe they did it because they felt a desire to right an injustice.  Maybe they had feelings that changed before, during, and after the event.  What I do know is those from Little Rock during that time were transformed in that event.  And like that butterfly, their transformation flitted on throughout the country as we made our way toward justice – as we continue to make our way toward justice.

Commemorative Garden. Note butterfly in photo. (Photo credit: Jennifer Andrews-Weckerly)

In the Commemorative Garden at the site, there is an inscription about the school.  It reads that Central High School, “…has survived, indeed not just survived but succeeded beyond anyone’s belief, becoming once again Arkansas’ premier high school.”  The inscription goes on to say, “It has achieved this not by returning to its old form merely showing its pretty face, but by modeling the diversity and pluralism that caused the original storm of protest.”

Post-pandemic, and indeed, in the modern era of Church, I think many are hoping to simply return to our old form, merely showing the Church’s pretty face.  But the massive disruption of the pandemic has convinced me that this is our opportunity not to become simply familiar again, but to become something excellent because of our evolution into the goodness God created us to be.  I wonder what new goodness God has invited you into in this post-pandemic season?  Where are butterflies beckoning your attention to see beauty not in what once was, but what is now, and in what can be?  I can’t wait to hear how you are seeing butterflies in your journey!

On Redefining our Work and God’s…

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

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This Sunday our church has planned “Bring a Friend Sunday.”  The day is the culmination of a series on evangelism, and we had imagined that bringing a friend would be a perfect way to conclude the series.  Some people have excitedly shared with me whom they plan to bring with them this Sunday, others have expressed a tinge of anxiety, while others have not mentioned the day (or their fears about inviting friends) at all.  We have been using a series of videos to inspire us, distributed postcards and other invitation tools, and created fun social media posts.

But our class this past Sunday had me wondering if we were approaching our event all wrong.  In his book Transforming Evangelism, David Gortner talks about the fact that evangelism is not a program or an effort to “get more people in the pews.”  Instead, evangelism is about creating an ethos of sharing the good news.  That ethos involves doing our own inner work about our own journey in Christ, and cultivating the skills for evangelism, such as practicing gratitude, listening for the holy in other’s stories, strengthening a sense of humility, and knowing the sacred stories that speak most powerfully for us.

We concluded our session with a talk by Michael Harvey, who argues that evangelism is not about bringing people to church, but creating a culture of invitation.  He suggests that events like “Bring a Friend Sunday” place “success” in the wrong place.  In fact, he says the most important work we can do is invite others.  “Whether someone says yes or no is God’s bit.  That is not our bit.  Our job is to just offer a simple invitation,” says Harvey.  By both worrying about inviting and labeling “success” as acceptance, we confuse our work with God’s work.  Instead, Harvey suggests that faith communities focusing on faithfulness, not some measure of “success.”  Whether the friend you invited comes or not, the church says, “Well done!”

So, I’m officially changing the name of this Sunday to “Invite a Friend Sunday.”  If you come to Hickory Neck this week and tell me you invited a friend, I’ll have a gold star waiting for you.  I want to hear about your experience in invitation, whether the experience was different than your expectations, and what it was like knowing that the invitation was more important than the return.  I suspect we will all grow in Christ in the process.  I cannot wait to hear about your experiences in invitation!

inviteafriend-940x250

Photo credit:  davisstreetbaptist.org/how-to-invite-people-to-church/

The last moment of goodness…

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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The last bottle of expressed milk

The last bottle of expressed milk

In the last couple of weeks we have seen quite a lot of change in our infant.  She is finally getting up on her knees to crawl instead of doing her “commando drag.”  She is pulling up to a standing position and happily standing for a while.  She is trying and enjoying new solid foods, showing much more dexterity and ability than I had imagined.  And this week, she is slowly easing off of breastmilk.  After some early problems with weight gain, the doctors had me start giving her expressed milk to encourage more consumption.  Once that began, she quickly decided she liked bottles better.  And so for the last year I have been expressing milk for her to eat.

Many people have shown shock when they realize I put up with pumping that long.  What I knew from our first child is that, in some ways, producing milk has been the one expression of parenting that has felt purely good for me.  In all my other parenting efforts, I regularly feel like a failure – not being a consistent and effective disciplinarian, not being creative and fun-loving enough, not knowing how to answer the hard questions.  But producing milk, which luckily my body does quiet easily, was the one thing that I could do that was good and pure, and to me, felt holy.

Looking back, I know my feelings are a little irrational.  My ability to produce milk for a year does not make me a better parent any more than my challenges make me a bad parent.  The truth is that producing milk for so long is probably the only thing that I will ever be able to control when it comes to parenting.  Once that contribution is over, the rest of my journey with my daughter is going to be a series of wonderful successes and terrible failures.  And that is the nature of relationships between parents and children.

In many ways, I suppose that is how our relationship with God is too.  We have very little, if any, control over the relationship, and most of the time we will feel like failures in the relationship.  It will be messy, hard, and sometimes discouraging.  But there will also be wonderful moments of grace, joy, and laughter.  The trick is agreeing to stay in the relationship, even when we do not feel like we are very good at it.  And quite frankly, God has that whole unconditional love thing down way better than most of us as parents or children do.  So hang in there, keep up the good work, and don’t take it all too seriously.  Happy Lent!